Interesting, but why did you write your own MVC framework when there are already a number of high-quality, well-known, well-tested and debugged frameworks out there like Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, etc.?

Originally posted by Jesper de Jong: Interesting, but why did you write your own MVC framework when there are already a number of high-quality, well-known, well-tested and debugged frameworks out there like Struts, Spring MVC, WebWork, etc.?

Interesting, but why did you write your own MVC framework when there are already a number of ...

Not only is it a great learning experience, but sometimes you don't want something with all the bells and whistles of full-blown frameworks that were written to be general purpose and may have a lot of bloat that's not necessary.

I've written my own light-weight framework and it suits my purposes to a tee.

I have also designed this sort of thing in the past as a learning experience. In your case I have a few questions and suggestions.

1. Is there any particular reason you use an I prefix on your Action interface? I personally find that names work best if they are 100% descriptive of their function, and 0% descriptive of their implementation.

2. defining your own "service" method is usually considered dangerous behaviour. Do you really want your Actions to respond to any old HEAD, PUT or OPTIONS request that appears at the server? Although it's clumsy, the best way is still usually to define one method (with whatever unclaimed name you like) and call it from redefined doGet and doPost methods.

3. I also worry that you have coupled your actions a bit too close to the Servlet API. My preference is to decouple knowledge of servlet API methods from the business logic as it can make unit testing your code immensely easier. This is particularly apparent where you do the request dispatching in the Action.

Given that you define the success and failure URLs externally, I would prefer to process them in the framework rather than the actions. Currently you don't have any sort of return value from your Action methods, so it should be simeple to return (for example) a boolean or enum representing Success or Failure and have the framework do the request dispatching.

For example, somthing like:

That way you only need the dispatch code in one place.

Similarly, I prefer to decouple the request and response objects, and instead pass in something like a Map of parameters and a Writer to write to.

If you do that you can then compile and test your Action classes without needing a Server, and without even needing to load the Servlet API classes.

4. I'm puzzled by the similarity in names between IAction and the Action class which appears later. In my experience things like this quickly act to confuse developers new to the project. Can you think of a more memorable name for one of them?

5. This one is really a personal preference. Can you explain a little why you chose to use XML for your configurations in a very light-weight framework like this? All the overhead of loading and using XML processing code when the same information could easily be represented as something like a simple properties file:

You may have lots of reasons to prefer XML that are not apparent in this example, but I always recommend that such decisions are thought through carefully rather than just assumed.

That will do for now, I guess. Thanks for sharing your design with us.

First of all, thank you very much for your valuable suggestions. All suggestions/comments are very good and I will apply them surely.

Here are some reasons why I did it that way...

1. Is there any particular reason you use an I prefix on your Action interface? I personally find that names work best if they are 100% descriptive of their function, and 0% descriptive of their implementation.

The reason is, we have coding standard document for our project and there I found that it is easy to identify an interface if it has prefix I.

Could you please explain this a bit "I personally find that names work best if they are 100% descriptive of their function, and 0% descriptive of their implementation" with an example if possible.

2. defining your own "service" method is usually considered dangerous behaviour. Do you really want your Actions to respond to any old HEAD, PUT or OPTIONS request that appears at the server? Although it's clumsy, the best way is still usually to define one method (with whatever unclaimed name you like) and call it from redefined doGet and doPost methods.

One more disadvantage in this approach is I am not able to use *POST* behaviour, no security of password....

But I am not sure how HEAD, PUT or OPTION etc request will come to my server???

But I change it.

3. I also worry that you have coupled your actions a bit too close to the Servlet API. My preference is to decouple knowledge of servlet API methods from the business logic as it can make unit testing your code immensely easier. This is particularly apparent where you do the request dispatching in the Action.

You mean, I am passing request and response to my doProcess() method. But I need these objects in action class.

I can think of two options:

1] Get information from request in main controller class and then pass only those infomation (in form of map) to action class instead of request. But every action class needs different informationm, so I think it is not feasible...

2] If I pass a map that has request, response and other things to action class, then also the case will be same. I can't write Junit for my action class, because I can't hardcode that map myself....

What can be other options??

The code you have given is superb, it is saving me from duplication of code. But again we will have to pass request and response....

4. I'm puzzled by the similarity in names between IAction and the Action class which appears later. In my experience things like this quickly act to confuse developers new to the project. Can you think of a more memorable name for one of them?

I will change it and think some good name for xml storage object... or will change interface name...

5. This one is really a personal preference. Can you explain a little why you chose to use XML for your configurations in a very light-weight framework like this? All the overhead of loading and using XML processing code when the same information could easily be represented as something like a simple properties file:

Here you are prefectly right. I never thought of properties file. I thought this type of file can be a XML only. I will surely think about it.

I like your MVC framework. I hope you will start a new project at sourceforge soon, and my company can be your first customer. I'd recommend to provide abstart classes for your interfaces to hide too much implementation details and work with simple call like display(error), display(email), and so on. Actually you have already got this recommendation.

Originally posted by dema rogatkin: I like your MVC framework. I hope you will start a new project at sourceforge soon, and my company can be your first customer. I'd recommend to provide abstart classes for your interfaces to hide too much implementation details and work with simple call like display(error), display(email), and so on. Actually you have already got this recommendation.

Thank you very much Dema. Sorry I didn't get what you recommend. Please explain a bit more. Thanks again.

Frank Carver
Sheriff

Joined: Jan 07, 1999
Posts: 6920

posted Nov 24, 2005 04:46:00

0

Originally posted by rathi ji: The reason is, we have coding standard document for our project and there I found that it is easy to identify an interface if it has prefix I.

Could you please explain this a bit "I personally find that names work best if they are 100% descriptive of their function, and 0% descriptive of their implementation" with an example if possible.

I guess my question could be rephrased as: Why does the code that uses this interface, and the people reading this code, need to know that it is an interface? If you use it as the type of a variable, parameter or return value, it doesn't matter if it is an interface or a class, the usage and the meaning is just the same. The most important thing is that each name is as descriptive as possible of its purpose. If you really do need to know implementation details such as whether it is an interface or an abstract class (for example) you can always look it up. But in the great majority of code that simply makes no difference.

If I write something like:

Is "Map" a class or an interface? I don't care, and I doubt that you do.

But I am not sure how HEAD, PUT or OPTION etc request will come to my server???

All the more reason to make sure that nothing unexpected happens if they do

You might be surprised how many systems issue a HEAD request before a GET or POST. HEAD is useful because it returns a set of HTTP headers without needing the page body, so it can be used to check things like modification dates without forcing the application to do potentially lengthy processing and data transfers. Look up any reasonable HTTP and/or WEBDAV reference to find out about the other possibilities.

You mean, I am passing request and response to my doProcess() method. But I need these objects in action class.

Do you really? Or do you just need somewhere to read parameters from, and somewhere to write output to? In my experience, 99% of web applications need no more than this.

I can think of two options:

1] Get information from request in main controller class and then pass only those infomation (in form of map) to action class instead of request. But every action class needs different informationm, so I think it is not feasible...

Although I have seen applications that laboriously extract values from the parameters and build a new Map to pass to business logic, this is a clumsy way to do it. The servlet API provides a simple way to get all the supplied parameters in one go using the getParameterMap method of a ServletRequest method.

2] If I pass a map that has request, response and other things to action class, then also the case will be same. I can't write Junit for my action class, because I can't hardcode that map myself....

I'm not sure I understand this. Putting some information into a Map to pass to some code is something I do every day in JUnit. Here's a short example showing how you could test something like your doProcess code without involving any of the Servlet API :

Obviously your code would need more tests than that, but I hope you can see how it might work.

[QB} Thank a lot again. I am very glad to have such mentors. [/QB]

You are welcome. That's what JavaRanch is here for!

ankur rathi
Ranch Hand

Joined: Oct 11, 2004
Posts: 3830

posted Nov 24, 2005 05:46:00

0

Thanks Frank.

I'm not sure I understand this. Putting some information into a Map to pass to some code is something I do every day in JUnit. Here's a short example showing how you could test something like your doProcess code without involving any of the Servlet API

No, I didn't mean that. I was thinking of a map that has request, response and some other objects in it. Someting like this:

Now in this case, Junit is not possible because it is as bad as passing request object directly.

But now it is clear to me, I will pass request parameters map instead of request object. But what is the need of writer object??? I think if I want to display any specific kind of error message then it is useful, I will write that into this writer.

Is this right and only use of this writer??

Now I am not overridding service() method. I am calling my own method from doGet() and doPost() both.

Regarding IAction interface and Action class (XML storage object), I have still not come up with any alternative name.

Thanks a lot again.

ankur rathi
Ranch Hand

Joined: Oct 11, 2004
Posts: 3830

posted Nov 24, 2005 06:39:00

0

Hi,

This is really very basic question but I am not clear. This is my signIn.jsp file:

How can I send three different events from the same form?

In other words, There are three buttons at my page and I want different action on each click of each button. How could I do this??? or how can I know at server side that which button has been clicked by user???

I am sure there must be many ways of doing this, please tell me the simpler one and best one.

Thanks a lot.

ankur rathi
Ranch Hand

Joined: Oct 11, 2004
Posts: 3830

posted Nov 24, 2005 06:47:00

0

Here are 2nd version of my two files which has major changes.

Now, I think I can write Junit for my action classes. No code duplication. Not overridding service() method...

But still getting this exception:

What can be the reason?

Thanks a lot.

Frank Carver
Sheriff

Joined: Jan 07, 1999
Posts: 6920

posted Nov 24, 2005 06:51:00

0

But now it is clear to me, I will pass request parameters map instead of request object. But what is the need of writer object??? I think if I want to display any specific kind of error message then it is useful, I will write that into this writer.

Is this right and only use of this writer??

You might not even need it in your application. Or you might need a different way of passing results back from your action handler to the framework. I'm afriad I don't know much about what you want to do with these actions, and what (if any) output values they might produce, so I can't help much beyond this point.

My own framework for this sort of thing (mojasef) does something a bit more complicated, which allows the action handler to write things back into the map of parameters which are then made available to the page that is eventually displayed. Other frameworks may work differently.

ankur rathi
Ranch Hand

Joined: Oct 11, 2004
Posts: 3830

posted Nov 24, 2005 07:26:00

0

Originally posted by Frank Carver:

You might not even need it in your application. Or you might need a different way of passing results back from your action handler to the framework. I'm afriad I don't know much about what you want to do with these actions, and what (if any) output values they might produce, so I can't help much beyond this point.

My own framework for this sort of thing (mojasef) does something a bit more complicated, which allows the action handler to write things back into the map of parameters which are then made available to the page that is eventually displayed. Other frameworks may work differently.

Yes, you are right. I am also thinking that my doProcess() method should return something more than boolean so I can use it somewhere. In that case, I even don't need to pass Writer object to my action classes. Because I can put any error message (or anything else) into list or map and then return that list or map....